Katy Dickinson

The Great Railway Bazaar (by Paul Theroux)

I finished one book on the drive home and had to go to Border's for a new book to get me through dinner. I thus interrupted my current naval reading theme with the quick read of a famous and excellent travel book: The Great Railway Bazaar: by train through Asia by Paul Theroux (ISBN-10: 0618658947, originally published in 1975).

My husband and I have a work trip to Bangalore later this month so the description of train travel in India was particularly of interest; however, Theroux's chapters about travelling in Viet Nam in 1973 just before America withdrew were fascinating and sadly in line with current events. Since John and I have a long drive between work and home, I read him funny or specially well written sections of The Great Railway Bazaar. John's favorite passage was:

The romance assocated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme privacy, combining the best features of a cupbord with forward movement. Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous vision, a grand tour's succession of memorable images across a curved earth -- with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea -- is possible only on a train.

Theroux funded his trip with a series of lectures and seems to have carried a small and superb library along with him. The Great Railway Bazaar is full of quotes and literary references. For example, Theroux includes a long passage then writes: "There is more, and it is all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description of Calcutta is Todger's corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin Chuzzlewit."

Theroux has strong opinions about people, places, and national character. Here he is writing from Hue, Viet Nam about the local railway stationmaster:

He was certain that Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty he envisaged -- indeed, it seemed characteristic of the South Vietnamese grasp of political geography -- was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of the Viet Cong and laying tracks through the swamps of Cambodia. His transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer in a healthy world.

The author is no less critical of his own nation, America. In the chapter "The Saigon-Bien Hoa Passenger Train" in Viet Nam he writes of some houses with no drains that he could see from the tracks:

They were appropriate in a country where great roads led nowhere, where planes flew to no purpose, and the government was just another self-serving tyranny. The conventional view was that Americans had been imperialists; but this is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power -- road-mending, drainage, or permanent buildings.... Planning and maintenance characterize even the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a legal system there aren't many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren't pledged to maintain.

Posted at 04:05PM Feb 05, 2007 by katysblog in News & Reviews  |